ealloc

5 ms·

91.
by ealloc 13y ago
Hold on. Why do so many civil liberty proponents such as yourself insist on dismissing and trivializing the Trayvon Martin case? Isn't it possible to care about both racism and wiretapping/drones/secrecy a the same time? Isn&
92.
by ealloc 13y ago
Interestingly, Roosevelt wasn't elected in his first term and only became president because McKinley was assasinated. Would he have been able to run on his own at that point? I suspect not - he would have been viewed as too progressive
93.
by ealloc 13y ago
I wouldn't say the rule of law is an illusion - it's a social construct or a social tradition. The rule of law has had real power in the past, and has often given the minority power over the majority. The problem is that as a soci
94.
by ealloc 13y ago
It's also a straw man argument. Nobody ever claimed voice recordings were collected, all news sources were very clear about that. He's just distracting from the actual complaint, which is that all of the other data is collected.
95.
by ealloc 13y ago
I never said you couldn't criticise islam. In fact, I think Islam is terrible and deserves criticism and mockery. However, it is also true that many Muslim people are unjustly persecuted, and randomly bringing up that "their proph
96.
by ealloc 13y ago
This type of racism carried out by people who are too lazy to realize they are hurting other people by their social blindness. It has to do with being oblivious to social context, due to one's priviledge. The subject of Mohammed's child bri
97.
by ealloc 13y ago
This is definitely a "Just So" scientific story. That is, it is an unverifiable account of why things might have happened. They used to be common in evolutionary thought until it became clear they were often wrong. Just so stories can be th
98.
by ealloc 13y ago
Quoting the number of gun accidents is misleading. The point of a license is to keep dangerous equipment out of the hands of people who are a danger to others or themselves. Thus you should really count murder/suicide too, and as wikipedi
99.
by ealloc 13y ago
oops you're right. Nevertheless, he clearly intends to extend rather than replace floating point since one of the goals is to estimate the errors in the floating point calculations, and he rounds.
100.
by ealloc 13y ago
He want more than compile-time simplification. He wants runtime simplification depending on the values encountered at runtime. For example in the quadratic equation. And, he clearly isn't marketing it as a replacement for floating point. He
101.
by ealloc 13y ago
At some point you _do_ have to use floating point (the whole point of numeric computations is to do things you can't do symbolically), however, this project might enable judicous use of symbolic manipulation in coordination with floating po
102.
by ealloc 13y ago
There are a number of these. The one I have been using lately is sympy - a pure python symbolic math library. You may also be interested in the open source "sage mathematics", which is a frontend/interface to many different open-source symb
103.
by ealloc 13y ago
Actually, wealth follows an exponential distribution for the lower 95% of individuals (by wealth) [1]. However, yes, it does follow a power law for the 5% richest. [1] http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0103544
104.
by ealloc 13y ago
Exactly. The actual interesting thing about this crystal is that the atoms will spontaneously start spinning as you remove energy from the system. Ie, in the ground state (the lowest energy state) the atoms are in motion. This is in contras
105.
by ealloc 13y ago
Good summary. But I disagree with the author that immutable strings and ubiquitous hashes are merely unfortunate idioms of python - to me python is about simplicity, and those things are what make python conceptually simple. I don't have to
106.
by ealloc 13y ago
as lcampbell said, the point of mining is actually to keep and confirm legitimate transactions. Mining needs to be a 'difficult' (but otherwise useless) problem like cryptographic hashing in order to make it difficult to fake transactions.
107.
by ealloc 14y ago
The rules governing bitcoin are maintained by consensus, and the bitcoin developers have a large sway on this consensus. If the majority of people decided they didnt like the current rules (eg all the people complaining about bitcoin deflat
108.
by ealloc 14y ago
Currently bitcoin supply is inflationary because 25 bitcoins are created every 10 minutes, and a similar amount will be generated for decades. True, this amount is set to decrease to 0 eventually. However, with some planning conceivably thi
109.
by ealloc 14y ago
It may not be too late - the parameters controlling the deflation are independent of bitcoin's cryptosystem, and can (technically very easily) be changed and improved. I think Bitcoin's creator thought a deflationary policy would help gener
110.
by ealloc 14y ago
It seems to me the oculus rift can accrately account for all head motion when you are standing still. There is no need for eye-tracking: All the rift has to do is detect all head bobbing & rotation, and update the view acocrdingly. Your
111.
by ealloc 14y ago
Bitcoin's fiscal policy is only one part of the whole bitcoin idea. It is possible to change the fiscal policy while keeping the rest of the crypto-based system. The fiscal policy is controlled by two numbers which are chosen by 'consensus
112.
by ealloc 14y ago
The book "Powering the Future" also argues fuel will always outperform batteries, pointing out that both fuel and batteries store chemical energy, and that chemical energy density is fundamentally contrained by physics: Since all atoms are
113.
by ealloc 14y ago
The equivalent petition for Steve Heymann: https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/fire-assistant-us-...
114.
by ealloc 14y ago
> Most of the DNA in the human genome is junk This topic is still very controversial and I don't think the article should be citing it in this context. It was only a few months ago that the ENCODE project released its first results clai
115.
by ealloc 14y ago
No. You can imagine the fabric of space being dragged into the black hole faster than the speed of light. Since nothing within spacetime can move faster than that, no signals can ever leave the event horizon. It's like a swimmer going over
116.
by ealloc 14y ago
Fair enough, if it's just an analogy I agree it gives the right intuition. To be clear, what really happened under MWI is that the wavefunction "branched" into two around the time you created the two particles, and the two branches spearate
117.
by ealloc 14y ago
What you are describing is a "hidden variable theory", but it has been shown (See "Bell's Theorem") such a theory cannot be true. QM is stranger than that.
118.
by ealloc 14y ago
Yes, I see why a repetition/pattern approach wouldn't work, but I'm proposing something else: That the file may be generated by an algorithm, in the way one generates the digits of pi using an algorithm. It's similar to how if I suspected h
119.
by ealloc 14y ago
If you just have to decompress a single file, I don't see why this problem is impossible since you can tune your decompressor to that file. For example, files containing the digits of pi or e will have a uniform distribution of bytes (and a
120.
by ealloc 14y ago
> If you do not care about music enough to seek it out (which is most people) If most people don't care much about music, why should we as a society spend so much money supporting the music industry? I view the music industry & pop

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